The present invention relates, in general, to methods and apparatus for licensing and managing the usage of digital content.
Although computer programs, individually also referred to as computer software products, video games, music, etc., can be sold to an end user, a more frequent approach is to license the digital product or program to an end user, with the software vendor or owner retaining ownership of all of the rights to the product.
Each license is devised to control the usage of the product or software by stating the conditions under which the product may be used, such as the location of use, the number of times used, etc. Digital products are licensed in many ways. By one category, licenses can be divided into node-locked licenses or network licenses. By another category, licenses can be divided into product licenses or product suite licenses. In general most licenses could be described by a combination or a simple variation thereof of the above two categories; i.e. node-locked product licenses, node-locked product suite licenses, network product licenses, and network product suite licenses.
Node-locked licenses restrict the use of software and digital products to a given computer. The major limitation of this approach is that it requires customers to purchase software separately for each potential user. Since each user does not use each software on his machine all the time, software purchased via this approach would idle most of the time. This is a very inefficient use of customers' money.
Network licenses allow access to the software products on computer networks formed of a number of interconnected computers or nodes which may be linked to each other and/or a central host. This addresses the primary inefficiency of node-locked licenses. Since the customer must purchase licenses only to cover the anticipated number of peak simultaneous users of that software.
Product licensing restricts the use of the license to only the product for which it is valid. In other words, the license is not transferable to other products. The limitation of this approach is that a customer must purchase the peak licenses, either node-locked or network, for each product separately. Again, peak usage for different products do not occur at the same time. Hence, the customer ends up purchasing more software licenses than really required.
Product suite licenses allow access to several software products using common licenses. A suite would generally include several individual programs which may be run concurrently with each other or individually and may or may not be linked to other programs in the suite. Traditional licensing approaches for computer programs or suites typically involve one license for all of the programs in each entire suite such that a user on a node of a computer network is charged with one license use regardless of which program the user is running from a particular program suite. A major limitation of this approach is that it assumes that each product in the suite has an equal value. Also, product suites typically involve a small number of software products which complement each other, and the expansion of suite licensing to license a wide range of software products is commercially impractical.
A recent development in licensing has been the units based licensing of multiple products. In such a system, different products are assigned different values in terms of units. A customer would license a certain number of units to run any and all of these products. While on paper, this system appears to address limitations listed above, in reality it does not due to the manner in which it is implemented by several organizations. Under this setup, when a user runs multiple products, the user is charged multiple units, also called stacking of units. Since the customers have limited budgets for purchasing software products, this system (i) forces the users to terminate one product in order to run another, thus decreasing the user's efficiency, or (ii) forces the customer to purchase additional licenses with no additional value thus undermining the profitability of their organization. This system does not encourage users to try new products, even though they are accessible and available on their network.
Other types of licensing techniques, such as a leveling license approach, enable new digital content to be used without incurring many or any additional licensed units. Either license approach can work for companies having multiple users tied together in a company based computer network.
Home computer users typically download many different types of digital content, including computer software, digital music, video games, movies, etc. While some homes can have multiple computers and multiple simultaneous users interconnected by a home based computer network, the number of users is relatively small, being on the order of two or three network connected nodes in each network at lower use or license fees.
Further, home computer users typically download the different forms of digital content from many different sources. These multiple sources make license management inoperable. In addition, the relatively small, individual users who download digital content from multiple sources are unable to take advantage of group discounts, parental monitoring and block-out, etc.
To provide a wider range of available digital content, it would be desirable to provide a club or group based approach whereby any number of unrelated individuals, either at businesses, home, etc., can form a group and act in the same manner as a company by operating under a license approach for the most economical use of a wide range of digital content made available in a selectable digital product suite.